Why Polly Was So Special

Her Abduction, Death Penetrate The National Consciousness

Polly Klaas was one of 58,215 missing children in the United States, a figure nearly identical to the number of American fatalities in the Vietnam War.

Mostly the statistics add up to a heap of private agony. But the Klaas family hasn't suffered alone. Polly's case has singularly galvanized the public and the news media.

Few child abductions have penetrated the national consciousness as deeply as this one. The Bobby Franks case in Chicago, back in the 1920s. Bobby Greenlease, kidnapped from a private school in Kansas City in 1953, and later killed. Adam Walsh in 1981, largely because of the TV movie two years later. And the ''crime of the century,'' the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh's infant son in 1932.

The Klaas case has its own constellation of news-media images. The artist's sketch of the kidnapper. The boiler room in Petaluma, Calif., full of volunteers packaging fliers for the search. A tight-jawed Marc Klaas pounding on a table during an interview, shouting, ''It's time. . . . We've had enough of this!'' Richard Allen Davis' bright orange jail garb and expressionless face. The aching finality of Sunday's newspaper headline: Polly Found Dead.

But the image that clings most steadfastly is Polly Klaas herself, and that may be the first reason this kidnapping broke from the pack.

The faces of kidnapped children are a forlorn detail of modern life. They stare fixedly out from milk cartons, from convenience store windows, occasionally from the pages of newspapers. Sadly, they hardly register anymore; the eye moves on.

We didn't become acquainted with Polly Klaas from a frozen photographic pose. Her family used camcorders, and supplied TV stations with pictures of a child going about the joyous business of being a child.

Glimpsed on those home videos, Polly Klaas seemed even more alive than most kinetic 12-year-olds. She smiled radiantly at us from a backyard swing, playing giddily to the camera. We saw her too singing in her starry, capped-sleeve costume - dress-up time - in a school production, impish and self-aware.

Snapshots on milk cartons can't convey the twinkle of girlish fantasies and the pure exuberance of childhood. Moving pictures can. The Polly Klaas videos on TV gave her a personality, and infused the search with an infectious urgency.

Second, the circumstances of Polly's kidnapping hit a raw nerve. She was surrounded by friends in the safest place a child knows - home. Her mother was nearby. This kidnapping was more than a terrible crime; it was a sacrilege, magnifying the psychological blow. The public may have surrendered the streets long ago, but Polly Klaas was snatched from sanctuary.

Third, it was Petaluma, Calif. If we've surrendered the streets, we've surely come to grudging conclusions about our major cities. But Petaluma is a dollop of the rural American heartland dropped incongruously close to a coastal metropolis.

The dominant feature of its downtown skyline, if it can be called a skyline, is a grain elevator. The town's leading industry is dairy farming. Disenchanted urban dwellers dream about places like Petaluma, where the police logbook is a compendium of quiet misdemeanors.

Monday night on Day One, the ABC newsmagazine show, the network's veteran Bay Area correspondent, Ken Kashiwahara, closed a segment on Polly Klaas by saying, ''The candle in Polly's window is gone now, and so is the town's innocence.''

That's the sort of broad statement to which even the best of TV journalists are susceptible, and it contains an element of truth. For a few years at least, the mention of Petaluma will conjure thoughts of kidnapping and murder.

I experienced it when I dialed directory assistance. ''For what city?'' asked the operator. ''Petaluma,'' I said. Just then I sensed what was on both of our minds, and felt an awkward complicity in tragedy.

A fourth reason the Klaas case became a news-media storm is the Polly Klaas Foundation, formed almost spontaneously for the express purpose of keeping Polly in the public eye. The chance that Polly and her abductor would be found depended on solid police work and saturation coverage.

The families of many missing children pray vainly for the white-heat intensity that the Klaas case generated. Where the search is feverish, there is hope. Volunteers responded to Polly Klaas, and the news media churn barely stopped for eight weeks.

When you think about the hours those volunteers worked - collecting freshly printed fliers, mailing them to distant places, sorting out thousands of telephone calls - you realize that Kashiwahara was mistaken after all. Here's one town that won't forfeit its innocence so easily.